Active Aerodynamics Design Methodology for Vehicle Dynamics Enhancement

Abstract

This paper presents a workflow methodology for CAD design and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of an active aerodynamic package for a sports vehicle. The objective is to provide a method in case of limited resources, such as time and computational power, in order to enhance the vehicle dynamic performances by the improvement of its aerodynamic characteristics. The use of the superposition principle is necessary to perform fast evaluation of the results having three different entities: base vehicle, active front splitter and active rear wing. The dynamic behavior of the vehicle is entangled with the properly made workflow. The results usefulness is related to the understanding of the improvements achieved on the baseline vehicle. The results point out the importance of the aerodynamic improvements connected to the vehicle dynamics enhancement of a sport vehicle.